Hiki worked with Getty Images to combat stereotypical representations of autistic people.
Hiki is the world's largest friendship and dating app for the autistic community. It's different from other dating apps because of its purpose, which is to empower the autistic community with connection.
Autistic people are four times more likely to be lonely. From Hiki's perspective, a key reason that autistic people are stigmatized in culture is because of the lasting impact of media and advertising that has depicted autism as a tragedy.
As a result, false assumptions and misinformation have led to biased imagery that has mischaracterized those across the autism spectrum. Hiki aimed to reshape these restrictive perceptions and drive authentic representation of the community by dismantling existing media prejudice.
Hiki's overarching goal was to unify and empower the autistic community in the platform age. To accomplish this, the company set out to leverage the power of media to tackle problematic stereotypes and stigma.
Today, about 15 to 20 percent of the population worldwide is considered to be neurodivergent, spanning different genders, ages, races, and more. At the same time, casual and explicit ableism is normalized in society and autistic people suffer as a direct consequence of it. Seventy-nine percent of autistic people report feeling lonely because of societal ostracization, 80 percent are under or unemployed, and autistic people are three times more likely to die by suicide than allistic people.
All of this reinforces the impression that autism is something to be pathologized rather than recognizing that those carrying the trait are a valid identity group in need of support and equity, not pity and infantilization. To create a positive change for autistic people, Hiki maintains that the current landscape of autistic representation in media needs to change.
Hiki's target audience was autistic individuals in the U.S. The company created strategic audience profiles for the Hiki audience, each with insights on dating app usage, sexuality, household income, location region, and motivations for joining the Hiki community, such as celebrating the autistic experience, having a sense of belonging, and partaking in Hiki's pursuit of justice.
In partnership with Getty Images, Hiki aimed to combat problematic stereotypes that affect the autistic community by creating "#AutisticOutLoud," a custom content initiative to increase the authentic representation of autistic people through the lens of the community. By bringing in content creators and photographers who identified as autistic, the #AutisticOutLoud campaign featured a curated gallery of images and videos that delivered new visual content depicting the resiliency and diversity of the autistic community.
The content created from this initiative lives on Getty Images' Disability Collection and Unsplash and is available for commercial use by media platforms and publishers worldwide to help drive awareness in the industry. By centering on autistic expressions, Hiki was able to reshape media to be more representative of a community that has long been spoken over and for.
To overcome the lack of actual authentic representation of autism in media, Hiki crafted a partnership between Hiki and Getty Images to create the first large-scale effort to reshape autistic representation in media.
Using their combined expertise, Hiki and Getty Images tasked ten autistic content creators with creating self-portraits that captured their authentic, personal experiences.
By taking self-portraits, the autistic content creators represented themselves most authentically and thereby combatted existing media representation that has unfairly spoken on behalf of the autistic community. These creators became part of Getty Images' global contributor network.
Not only are brands able to commercially license the content from this curated gallery, but a portion of the gallery is also accessible royalty-free through Unsplash, meaning that any bloggers or small businesses have access to this work.
The #AutisticOutloud project launched at Cannes to galvanize the ad industry into doing better.
Within eight weeks of launching the #AutisticOutLoud campaign, the visuals were downloaded over 300,000 times, garnering 35 million views.
Within six months of the campaign, the Hiki app had increased subscribers by 50 percent, with 50,000 new users joining the 100,000 existing adults on the platform.
Additionally, Forbes, Ad Age, and Yahoo Finance all reported on Hiki's campaign
Finally, the work is being championed by the Unstereotype Alliance, the United Nations' platform for combatting stereotypes in media and advertising.
